Zokk! There’s An Arkham City Demo On Steam

Share this:

With everything else that went on last year I felt like we skipped over Arkham City a bit, which is a shame because it was a great game, with ideas aplenty. Also: Batman. Anyway, consider this your reminder to take a look if you haven’t, because there’s a demo gone up on Steam, giving you limited access to Arkham’s open-world Batman ’em up. Perhaps them compare those experiences with Adam’s verdict.

28 Comments

Funny you should say that because it’s a timed demo. 15 minutes. Two missions. Free Selina from Two-Face and then rescue some hostages from Harley’s thugs. You can explore a small area but there are invisible walls pegging you in. Works great as a stress test. Overall I’m happy to know that it runs perfectly well o my little notebook using a 310m (low settings – haven’t tried turning them up yet) and looks and plays ok.

Word of warning – there’s no FoV setting, so on a widescreen monitor it may give you a headache. There is a hacky workaround, you can modify one of the configs to add a keybind that sets it to whatever value you want (something around 100 is probably good), the only problem is that it’ll occasionally revert back to default when there’s a cutscene or whatever, so it’s a bit of a pain. Fucking irritating that devs don’t seem to understand the basic principles of FoV, the game was literally giving me a headache after 20 minutes or so because it felt like I was squinting the whole time…

As far as I understand, the game has to be connected to GFML to save. So if you get disconnected from the service, a little GFWL popup warns you, and then the game will no longer save your progress. If you don’t notice the warning and keep playing, when you come back later, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised to realize that you lost your progress. It seems a particularly bad design decision not to display “YOUR GAME IS NOT BEING SAVED! PLEASE RESTART!” continually in an impossible to miss way.

TBH, I never had an issue with any GFWL games but I do realize that’s not true for everyone.
Just a little idea for you, it’s something I do.. I simply mirror the “my games” folder to backup on another drive for me. That way whenever I reformat my PC I still have all my saved games. (Sometimes I need to manually backup a few games that don’t default to My Games but hardly. I have like 4 years of games saved like this.. Works great and yea, you don’t really need to worry about losing them so easily of course. Just check out google on how to do that if you ever really decide you care.

I noticed this and was surprised, I fully finished it on my PS3 anyway, I have to say I was worried that the walled off city would be dull but it had some of the most unexpected level design in certain parts that I had no idea would be included and characters I was not expecting.

For a game with such a lot going on it tied the abilities in really well, nothing felt unfinished.

My only problem is I felt that the Riddle thugs interrogation got a bit grindy

Bought this on Steam for €11,99 a few weeks back. Excellent game. However, it comes with GFWL which – as all games with the malware – caused initial problems for me until I figured out how to create an offline profile through a guide on YouTube.

Once you get past GFWL, the game is very good. I’d say it’s one notch above Arkham Asylum.

Beware of Advanced Augmented Reality Training #1, though. You have been warned!

Releasing demos months and months after a game is actually out is the dumbest idea ever.
They should either have a demo BEFORE or AT Launch.
You know.. So people can decide if they want the game or not.. To see if it even works for them before they buy it.. Yea..

Don’t give people a demo to try a game out and what’s going to happen?
Right, they are going to go pirate it instead. A ten year old could of told them that.
/me golf claps

You strike a good point but still.
From a marketing prospective it’s still very simply counter-productive.
Naturally you want to ride that first “big wave” as hard as you can.

And it’s the fact that so many people DID go just torrent it instead of buying it for fear it it being total shite.
And it’s the fact that at least half of those people probably decided after they wouldn’t bother buying it..
ONLY because they had already played a bunch at that point and got their fix.
Only if they had a demo, they would of enjoyed the demo and it’d of ended and they’d of WANTED MORE.
Whole point of a demo really.. But yea, they can’t have that effect now because well.. All those people who wanted to try it.. Have already done so now likely by other non-legal means..

I simply think Devs under estimate the value of a simple DEMO when it comes to fighting something like piracy..

I’m not sure I entirely agree with you – people who are going to pirate the game and not buy it if it’s good (ie not the ‘try before you buy’ brigade) are going to pirate it anyway, demo or not.

However I do agree with your main point – a demo is essential when games are release, if not to deter piracy then to deter apathy. In either case the aim should be to maximise sales. I bought AC recently during one of the £10 sales; if there had been a demo available they’d have got my money at full price when the game released. In contrast, the only PC game I’ve paid full price for in the last 6 months was CKII, after being seduced by the demo.

The obvious exception is when a game is unmitigated crap. In that situation a demo will hurt sales more than it will help them. Unfortunately these days I tend to assume a game is crap if there is no demo, and only buy when it’s cheap enough that I won’t mind too much if I’m proved right.